


An Angel's confession at death's door

by Raptarion



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: (As much as you can be when the canon seems to barely manage to be compliant with itself), Angst, Canon Compliant, Gen, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-28
Updated: 2016-11-28
Packaged: 2018-09-02 20:17:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8681980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raptarion/pseuds/Raptarion
Summary: Years after the fall of Overwatch, Angela finds herself facing someone she wronged. The man once known as Gabriel wants to kill her. But if she's going to die, he deserves to know that condemning him to the state he is in now isn't her only sin.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This story is mostly just an excuse to share a head canon I have about Mercy being responsible for the fall of Overwatch. (Although I actually am beginning to think that she was probably just a pawn for the Overwatch Universe Illuminati thanks to the Sombra short. But that's another matter.)

Angela groans as she opens her eyes. The back of her head was throbbing with pain. When she sits up she almost screams as pain lances through her side. She looks down to see blood seeping from an open wound. She takes stock of her surroundings. There was a lot of rubble surrounding her. A small river of sewage runs around the pile of ruined asphalt and metal she finds herself in. In any direction are walls of more rubble ranging from about her height to easily three times that. It takes a while for her to deduce what had happened. The last she remembered was her caravan running into a collapsed roadway. She decided to leave it behind to head to their destination on foot. The injured refugees they were trying to get to were living on borrowed time as it was, and she couldn’t afford the detour they would have to take to get the caravan around the ruined infrastructure, while also avoiding the fighting happening further down town. While making her way on foot, the road seems to have collapsed underneath her into the sewers. She must have been knocked unconscious, and suffered some short term memory loss. She couldn’t have been out for long. Her nanobots were already numbing the pain and healing her wounded side.

She begins to reach for her communicator to see if any of the other members of her caravan could find her, when she hears the sound of heavy footfalls letting some of the rubble above her lose. A rock clatters down into the sewers around her, causing a splash of foul smelling sewage. She looks up to see who was there, and her blood runs cold. The white mask of the infamous Reaper stares down at her.

“Dr. Ziegler. Good to see you.” He growls. His body dissipates into smoke before her eyes and drifts down to settle mere feet from where she sat. She stands bolt upright as Reaper reforms, gasping in pain and gripping her still healing side. She remembers her pistol in spite of her panic. She looks down to where it was holstered at her hip and fumbles for it. When she looks back up she’s staring down the barrel of a shotgun.  
“Come now Doc. I thought you were a pacifist. You REALLY shouldn’t be brandishing around a weapon like that.” Reaper mocks. With some reluctance she drops the pistol out of her trembling hand.

“Your wound there seems to be healing up nicely. Those world famous nanobots of yours really are something else aren’t they?” Reaper asks.  
“I don’t understand. Did you come here and put me at gunpoint to make small talk?” Angela asks, amazed her voice wasn’t trembling more.  
“You’ve been at the top of my list for a very long time now Doctor. I’m not going to kill my number one target before we can have a chat.” Reaper explains. Angela stares in confusion.  
“I don’t understand. Why are you targeting me? I’m a doctor, I’m just trying to help people.” Angela explains. Reaper chuckles condescendingly.  
“That’s right. Helping people is what you do, isn’t it? You’re so good at it that you’ve brought back people anyone else would have written off as dead. You’re a real miracle worker.” Reaper says, his tone bitter. Angela is still trying to figure out what he was getting at when he reaches up with one hand to take his mask off. The face underneath it, in spite of being horribly disfigured, was unmistakable. Angela gasps in horror.

“Gabriel?” She asks, unable to believe it. He scowls at her in a way that was familiar, but also FAR harsher than she remembered. She’d never seen such hatred in his eyes. “What happened to you?”  
“You tell me Doc.” Reap- Reyes responds.  
And like that Angela understood. She thought she had failed that day. That her desperate attempt to bring Reyes back hadn’t worked. Had reduced him to nothing. But it didn’t. That smoke that had dissipated into the rubble. It had coalesced again. Into this. She had saved Reyes life. And from the look of it, had ruined his life as well.  
“I- I don’t know what to say. I never wanted this. I only wanted to help.” She pleads. As much for her own benefit as his. She could feel a knot of guilt tightening in her gut.  
“You really expect me to forgive you for this Ziegler? For the way you’ve ruined me?” He asks.

Angela looks into his eyes. Memories from the days of Overwatch crash into the forefront of her mind. Her conscience feels as heavy as lead. After a moment she speaks.  
“No. I don’t. But if you’re not going to forgive me, then you should know everything you shouldn’t forgive me for.” She says. Her voice almost unnaturally even. She struggles to order thoughts in her mind, as Reaper stares at her with a raised eyebrow.  
“Back in the days of Overwatch, I always spoke out against some of their methods for peacekeeping. You know that I’d butted heads with the highest members of the chain of command on more than one occasion. I worked with Overwatch because I thought I could fix it. I was… young. Arrogant. A little bull headed at times even. And all of this led to a very bad idea, once I discovered Blackwatch.”  
Angela struggles to keep her voice calm and steady. To not rush her words. She had his attention. And she needed to tell him this. To lift the weight of her secret off her shoulders. There were few people who deserved the truth of what happened more than him.

“A close colleague of mine first brought my attention to the covert arm of Overwatch. I thought I had problems with how Overwatch was run. But Blackwatch? The more me and my colleague dug the worse it seemed. This was everything I thought was wrong with the organization. Using violence to keep the peace. And I was determined to stop it. I began compiling evidence. It was hard. Blackwatch officially didn’t exist. Getting records was difficult. But I managed to scrape enough together for what I needed to do.  
I anonymously leaked the evidence to the media. What happened next worked out so perfectly in my mind's eye. The world governments would take notice, and investigate. Blackwatch would be discovered, and be disbanded. Overwatch would be subject to closer monitoring and stricter regulations.”

Angela chokes back something between a laugh and a sob. Tears were welling in her eyes. She had long ago started looking at the ground, afraid to look Gabriel in the face as she confessed her part in Overwatch’s downfall.  
“I was so arrogant. I thought I was going to single handedly fix Overwatch overnight. I was going to be the unsung hero that ensured peace without violence.  
Instead protests started. Overwatch began to fall apart. There was chaos…”  
She looks up again. Reyes had replaced his mask.  
“If it wasn’t for me, that confrontation at the Swiss headquarters would have never happened. I didn’t just fail to heal you properly. I’m the reason you were in that situation to begin with.” She says. Her voice monotone, but her face wrecked with anguish as tears streamed down her face. She couldn’t help it. She had held onto this guilt for years. And it was all the worse now that she saw what she had done to her former colleague.  
“...you didn’t have to tell me all of this.” He says.  
“I did though. You deserve to know. And I couldn’t die without admitting what I had done wrong.” She replies.

There’s a pause. Reaper takes a step forward. Angela fights the urge to take a step back.  
“Anything else you want to get off your mind?” He asks.  
“...nothing I can think of.” She responds, voice trembling.  
“Well then.” He says nonchalantly, as he presses the barrel of his gun into her abdomen and pulls the trigger. Angela feels pain overwhelm her senses as her insides are torn to shreds. She can’t find the breath to scream. She barely finds the sense of awareness to realize the force of the shot has sent her flying onto her back. She finds herself staring up at the sky, her vision blurring in and out as she struggles to hold onto consciousness. Reaper’s mask comes into view.  
“Nice chat doc.” He says, before disappearing. She can’t even find the strength to turn her head in the direction he disappeared to. She lies there, gasping for air as pain and shock cause her to hyperventilate. She doesn’t know how long she holds onto conscious thought. Time ceased to have real meaning. All she knows is the sun was still up before everything went black.

\-------------------------

When she opens her eyes, she isn’t looking up to the sky anymore. She’s looking at the canvas roof of a tent. She is no longer lying on rubble, but a cot. And the pain in her abdomen, while still incredible, was now bearable.

“Dr. Ziegler?” Comes a voice to her left. She turns her head to see one of the other doctors from her caravan.  
“Dr. Klein. What happened?” She asks.  
“After wa arrived at the refugee camp to find you missing, we organized a search party. We found you in the rubble of a collapsed road, barely clinging to life. From what we can tell you were shot point blank with a shotgun. Were it not for the nanobots in your system, you wouldn’t have survived long enough to get proper treatment.” She explains.  
“...I see.” She replies. She looks back up to the roof of the tent. A question already plaguing her mind. Gabriel knew of the nanobots in her body that healed all but the most critical wounds. And almost certainly knew about the rest of the Caravan that would notice her absence and go looking for her.

So. Did he leave her to die? Or did he leave her to live?


End file.
